What Is Ingest?

Before you can work with media in Final Cut Studio, you need to get it onto your hard disk and into Final Cut Pro. Ingest describes, in a very general sense, the process of capturing, transferring, or otherwise importing different types of video, audio, or image media into Final Cut Pro in order to use it in a program. Once in Final Cut Pro, media can be easily moved into any of the other Final Cut Studio applications.

There are three primary ways of ingesting media into Final Cut Pro:

Log and Capture window: You use the Log and Capture window to capture standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) media from a tape-based format, in real time.

Log and Transfer window: You use the Log and Transfer window to capture tapeless media in a wide variety of formats, including SD, HD, and even some 2K and 4K formats.

Import Files or Import Folders: You use the Import Files and Import Folders commands to import other kinds of QuickTime, audio, and image file formats, as well as compatible Final Cut Studio project and data files.

However, this is only part of the story. Depending on the type of media you’re ingesting, other applications such as Cinema Tools and Color might play a part in the ingest process. Workflows for ingesting film-originated media, in particular, can be more involved depending on how important it is to be able to match back to the original film negative and whether the film negative was transferred to videotape or DPX or Cineon image sequences. The following flow chart illustrates the different paths media might take into Final Cut Pro.

You can also import video, audio, and still-image files directly into other Final Cut Studio applications such as Motion and Soundtrack Pro, but video capture and transfer is limited to Final Cut Pro, and audio capture is limited to Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro.